Individuals

• Competition for muck from local horse stables is fierce. Some enterprising stable-owners start selling their manure on ‘Totnes Swap Shop’.
• A survey of the 5 car share schemes operating across Totnes town finds that cars without tow-bars are those that are taken out the least, as peoples’ gardens and allotments become their key weekend recreational activity, and they increasingly take out cars in order to shift manure, collect sea weed and other gardening-related equipment around. The car share schemes each add two trailers to their ‘fleets’; they are well used.

Community

• After months of increased intermittency, Morrisons closes, with the loss of 60 jobs. Despite constant reassurances that the business is safe, and is looking for new buyers, media reports speculate that the cost of transportation has made the business model unsustainable. One day, the shop was open with no sign of trouble, assuring customers that the recent occasional closures were now behind them, the next the shop was closed. For the next year, the building stands empty, becoming an eyesore in the middle of town.
• Dartington’s own catering now uses 40% produce from on the Estate, and many local shops now source from Dartington’s food co-op.
• Dartington Tinctures go on sale. Developed through a partnership with the University of Plymouth, they are based on a range of medicinal plants grown on the Estate, including various medicinal mushrooms.
• For the first time, demand for hands-on, practical courses at Schumacher exceed demand for the more academic ones.
• The International Sustainable Agriculture Summer School starts.

Producers

• The Sharpham Estate expands their vineyard, and also starts growing hops, adding ‘Sharpham Ale’ to their outputs. The ale proves so popular in local pubs that Sharpham opens its own pub in Totnes town, called ‘The Sharp Ham’.
• Totnes and District is now producing a food surplus that can be ‘exported’ to Torbay and Plymouth.
• Soil fertility levels in Totnes and District have risen to such an extent that chemical inputs have been halved.
• By 2017, the planting of the planting of the agroforestry farm at Dartington is completed for the northern half of the Estate
• All vehicles on Sharpham and Dartington estates are now powered by biomethane generated with the estates’ waste cooking oil, food and farm waste.
• The Sharpham Estate expands their vineyard, and also starts growing hops, adding ‘Sharpham Ale’ to their outputs. The ale proves so popular in local pubs that Sharpham opens its own pub in Totnes town, called ‘The Sharp Ham’.
• Old watermills, such as Crowdy Mill, are put back in use for grain milling and textile production.
• Red squirrels return to the area as grey squirrels are culled to protect nut crops.
• Herds of Devon Red cattle and hardier livestock breeds grazing in fields are now a common sight, now that grain feeding and indoor housing is too expensive an option for local farmers.
• In 2016 the costs of importing organic fabrics from abroad became exorbitant, forcing Greenfibres to look at restarting local fabric manufacture. Trial crops of hemp, flax and jute grown at Sharpham, are the first crops grown in the area specifically for their fibre potential for over 100 years.
• Two years after the initial fabrics trials, Greenfibres declares the experience as a “surprisingly wonderful” one. Company manager Rick Pike said “Initially we had great difficulties, partially with the raw material but also with the lack of skills. For example, with flax after our first failed season one of the community’s elders came forward who remembered how to set flax in the field (using a land roller!). We’re now starting to get final products, and many of them are of a much higher quality than anticipated.” The company has recently signed contracts with local farmers to produce four times as much of each of the crops in the following year (2018).
• Devon’s inspired 5s land use scheme has proved popular and is extended to 10 years. Other County Council’s are catching on and finding this opens up more land for very productive use.
• The Duke of Somerset makes land available for a CSA scheme in Berry Pomeroy, and begins to roll out an agroforestry plan across his estate, as well as setting up woodchip processing to supply the growing market locally for woodchips

Policy Makers & Service Providers

• New land reform laws make it easier to acquire land for food production. Many hundreds of young people and permaculturists set up new innovative farms, smallholdings and forest gardens across the South Hams.
• All local authority owned businesses procure their food from local sources, apart from ‘luxury’ (out of season) produce, which chefs are trained to minimise use of.
• 60% of food used by the public sector is procured locally.
• Devon County Council state that all of the Old Age People’s homes under their management must make their grounds into food producing landscapes. Some funding is made available and many of the residents are able to pass on their gardening skills to the staff and join in with some lighter tasks.
• South Hams District Council decide to remove their ornamental gardens and put in intensive, organic, well-designed and highly attractive edible landscapes. Although some initially bemoan the loss of the box hedging and the ornate shrubs, the sense of excitement about the new landscape rapidly builds, and after the first crop of salad harvested, in April 2017, complaints soon quieten.
• Community composting schemes replace the use of brown bins.

Leave a comment

If you wish to comment on a particular paragraph

and quote the relevant number in your comment.

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Notify me of follow-up comments via email

Subscribe to RSS feed for comments on this page